,. , , : , , , , : , :l;.i" : ' " , ,, ,, : : ' , , , ' , b ,,, . , ' , ' " , r , , ;' . , , un ',. " > Ir . N, : #; :, i:[:;i':;':': ,l5 ' ., ^;,: .... .. : . i.' j'. . ::; : w:? ;1- . , ". ;.::. :( '---'v .;:: ... . . , : ) \. '. ..;\" " ' ,f ; ' '; : ': : :.. :-r .. W1 (1fÚi' ':'rtlfu : :).:FV" . "q(. (^ '" . :\ ,4:w. , .-.'- \, "What are you pretending to be absorbed in?" . kingdom and the Hapsburg monarchy; for the emissaries of Berlin and the satraps of the Kremlin. During the uprising, which quickly became known as the Velvet Revolu- tion, and for a while afterward, there were graffiti around town proclaim- ing, "Havel je král"-"Havel Is King." The King tried to demystify his Cas- tle. He ordered the costume designer for the movie '1\madeus" to create red- white-and-blue uniforms for the pal- ace guards. (Communist-era guards wore khaki.) He himself at first refused the suits that his friend Prince Karel Schwarzenberg brought him. "I can't wear any of these!" Havel said. "I'd look like a gigolo." In jeans and sweater, he rode a scooter through the Castle halls. He threw a "festival of democracy" in the courtyards, with jugglers and mimes performing while he wandered around drinking Pilsner and greeting everyone. Later on, when he discovered that the chandeliers in the gilded Spanish Hall were outmoded, a couple of typical vis- itors, MickJagger and Keith Richards, paid for new fixtures For weeks, he drove his staff crazy as he monkeyed around with the remote control, dim- ming the lights, then brightening them agaln. . "When I first came here, there were many things that I found absurd," Havel told me in his office. A sly, can-you- believe-it smile creased his face. "For ex- ample, it seemed to us on the first day that there were three rooms, close to where we're sitting now, which you couldn't enter. When we finally got in- side, we discovered a kind of communi- cations facility for contacts within the Warsaw Pact. So we took advantage of that and sent a New Year's greeting to Mikhail Gorbache Later, I heard from confidential sources that the K.G.B. chie Vladimir Kryuchkov, didn't really appreciate the fact that we'd found those facilities." Within a few months of Havel's ascension, the euphoria of the Velvet Revolution began to fade. The poetry of those winter weeks, the theatrical press conferences and the street rallies, yielded to the prose of governing a ru- ined state. No more scooters, no more sneaking out of the Castle for a drink at a local pub. Havel allowed that he felt "strangely paralyzed, empty inside," fearful that dissent and governing were hardly the same. ' t the very deepest core of this feeling there was, ultimately, a sensation of the absurd: what Sisy- phus might have felt if one fine day his 92 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 17 & 24,2003 boulder stopped, rested on the hilltop, and failed to roll back down," he told an audience in Salzburg. "It was the sen- sation of a Sisyphus mentally unpre- pared for the possibility that his efforts might succeed, a Sisyphus whose life had lost its old purpose and hadn't yet developed a new one." Havel had been preceded by dictators and, therefore, had to learn to be a Pres- ident nearly on his own. He borrowed :&om many examples, especially:&om the humanism ofTomás Garrigue Masaryk, the President of the First Czech Re- public after the First World War, and from his friend Richard von Weizsäcker, the President of German)!. (The powers of the Czech Presidency are based largely on the postwar West German model; the President is secondary to the Prime Minister in domestic affairs but has great authority in making appointments and in foreign policy.) At times, Havel felt thorougWy insufficient, a :&aud. A fa- miliar Prague voice, the voice of Kafka, told him what anyone who has grown up in a police state knows instinctually- that it could all end as easily as It started. "I am the kind of person who would not be in the least surprised if: in the very middle of my Presidency, I were to be summoned and led off to stand trial before some shadowy tribunal, or taken straight to a quarry to break rocks," he told a startled audience at Hebrew Uni- versit)r, in Jerusalem, less than six months after taking office. "Nor would I be sur- prised if I were to suddenly hear the reveille and wake up in my prison cell, and then, with great bemusement, pro- ceed to tell my fellow-prisoners every- thing that had happened to me in the past six months. The lower I am, the more proper my place seems; and the higher I am the stronger my suspicion is that there has been some mistake." In Havel's thirteen years as Presi- dent-first of Czechoslovakia and then, after the Slovaks and the Czechs divided into two states, in 1993, of the Czech Republic-many of his advisers repeat- edly begged him to delete, or at least soften, these public moments of self- doubt. What effect would they have on an exhausted people waiting for the radical transformation of their country? (Imag- ine Chirac or Blair, Bush or Schröder beginning a national address with an ode to his midnight dread!) Havel, however,